Refrigerator Honey Heater

[power napper]

I am looking for good ideas on using a refrigerator for honey heating.
Our refrigerator died so now I have the "carcass" in my basement.
The refrigerator was a bottom freezer Amana.
The insides of the refrigerator is large enough to hold approximately four medium supers.
The bottom freezer has a pull out wire basket.
I feel confident that some of you bee keepers have many unique and varied set ups using refrigerators for the honey heating process.
Anyone care to share ideas on the best way to proceed?
Any and all inputs are appreciated.
Thanks

[Chef Isaac]

I have heard the a light bulb works nicely.

[dcross]

I have a cheap electric heater with a fan and a thermostat, it works really well. I also put in a cheap thermometer so I have an idea how hot it is.

[geoffkb]

I used an old refrigerator with, I think, a 40 watt bulb as a heater. It was a great success. I would put a 60lb bucket of honey, set absolutely hard, in overnight and it would liquefy it sufficiently to mix to make creamed honey.

Make sure the bulb doesn't touch the inside of the fridge, it'll melt and maybe catch fire. :eek: I should think one of those caged lamps for use in a workshop would be good.

If you want something more controllable you might try putting an immersible, thermostatically controlled, aquarium heater inside a large glass bottle of water set inside the fridge. The type of heater I mean is a heater and thermostat inside a test tube, I'm sure they'd be pretty cheap at a pet store. Then play with various temperature to see what suits you purpose.

[smoke]

Kelley company sells a thermostat to control the light bulb fixture.

[xC0000005]

At your local pet store, look for the reptile heater controls. Thermostat, temp gage and a standard plug that you hook to a light bulb. Turns it off when the temperature gauge is high enough.

[randydrivesabus]

you can use a light bulb with a thermostat like the one used for electric baseboard heaters.

[Walt McBride]

I took a discarded fridg. with a top freezer, opened the floor of the freez to the fridg. compartment, took out both door shelves and replaced with 1/4" plywood to give 18" depth for super boxes turned sidways. Removed compressor and coils and took out all shelving and replaced with 3/8" steel rods run through the box wall from out side for good support of heavy supers. Placed 4 porcelin lamp sockets on 1x4" board placed on the bottom of the cabnet with 40 watt bulbs wired through a Walter Kelley adj. thermostat. Also have a muffin fan in the circuit to rapidly move the warm air from the top back down to the lamp area via a metal duct made from a steel stud form. The box holds five mediun supers and allows me to extract well into winter when I fall behind on my Fall extracting. After the first use I added a aluminun shield under the lowest shelf to catch driping honey that fell on the lamps.
Walt

[dgl1948]

We use an old deep freeze with a thermostat we purchased from(http://www.honeyrunapiaries.com/store/). It runs 4, 60 watt bulbs we wired inside the freezer, a fridge would work just as well and you can controll the temperture to the exact degree. The sensor goes inside the unit and the control stays outside. If you use this setup just once you will be very pleased. We have used it from 500 ml jars to 5 gal pails and now we would simply not be without it.

[Ishi]

You can use a thermostat from an electric water heater. I use one in an insulated box I built with 2 100 watt bulbs. I have 2 pieces of angle iron that keep the 5 gal. Buckets above the bulbs and a piece of aluminum flashing as a heat deflector under the angle iron. I can liquefy 2 buckets in 48 hrs or turn it up to 170 F and melt 2 buckets of cappings in the same time. The thermostat has a range from 90 to 170 F.

[Brent Bean]

I use heat trace controlled by a good thermostat that can keep the temperature within a few degrees. The definition of raw honey is honey that is kept below 120 degrees. I have my heater set at 110 degrees and this will re-liquefy bottles of solid crystallized honey in 24 hours. I don’t think the heat source is as important as the means of controlling the temperature. If you get the honey to hot you can change it’s quality.

[power napper]

The "carcass" is now gutted and cleaned. I never ripped a refrigerator apart before.
After cleaning good we used a computer side case to make a plate to cover the air shaft on the back of the freezer. To this plate we mounted a 110 volt fan to suck the warm air out of the refrigerator back into the freezer.
Now we are ready to start assembling.
We do not have an adjustable thermostat or heating source installed yet.